Can The Huffington Post successfully export itself from the United States? We will soon have an answer, as founder Arianna Huffington announced months ago her intention to conquer the UK, France, and then Brazil. The UK version was launched on July 6. The British team has been lucky: the UK version launched just before the News of the World scandal exploded. Then they had the UK riots for weeks...there could be a worse time to launch a media. Despite these news-rich conditions, we can't say the UK version launch was a huge success from here. Guardian's contributor Peter Preston counted the average number of comments on the top ten blogs three weeks ago: “…2.9 per piece. The week after: 3.9. Last week: only 5.4, even in the eye of the London storm.” He added, “Conquering America took her years of slog and nil profit…Conquering Britain looks like the same hard slog all over again.” Preston is right and wrong: yes, it will be hard. But no, it won't be exactly the same.
First: The situation has changed. The Huffington Post is not in the same situation as it was in 2005 when it launched in the U.S. with 5 liberal bloggers and a curator. Now, HuffPo is the weapon in the hands of a big company, AOL, which intends to expand outside the U.S. As its CEO Tim Armstrong said, AOL wants to be for content what Amazon is for commerce, and Google is for search. But asking bloggers to write for free won't be as easy as it was when The Huffington Post was independent, and not profitable, and not yet sold to a big company for $315 million.
Second: The competition will be harder in Europe, because Huffpo will be jumping into a pack of very aggressive medias. First in line, Guardian, which also plans to expand internationally, including into the U.S. (with the hiring of a U.S. team). It already has a strong blogging community with their “Comment is free” section and the recently launched “Comment network”, which aggregates posts from a network of European and U.S. bloggers.
Third: Launching foreign editions is a real challenge. That’s why Guardian failed in its launch of GuardianAmerica.com between 2007 and 2009. They’re now trying to reboot the idea by building a new team in the U.S., but they’re not talking about a U.S. edition anymore; it’s more about providing better “local” coverage of U.S. news. The paradox is that while the U.S. edition failed, at the same time the UK edition brings many U.S. readers to its mother website, especially because it is not led by American journalists. It looks like American readers are interested in a foreign view on their country.
Don't misunderstand me: I love Arianna Huffington and The Huffington Post. I think she's one of the most visionary media leaders. That doesn't mean she can succeed in Europe, especially with “big AOL” on her back.
And bringing The Huffington Post to France will be another kind of challenge, a much more difficult one.
Last June, Huffington met some media leaders in Paris: Pierre Haski from the French liberal pure player Rue89, Louis Dreyfus from the French newspaper Le Monde, and Jacques Rosselin, editor-in-chief of the economic newspaper La Tribune, in the beautiful bar of the Bristol Hotel. She also met with a handful of entrepreneurs and intellectuals, like her friend Bernard-Henry Levy. Levy, a French philosopher who runs a blog on The Huffington Post, will probably be a key person in the hiring of the French team. What did she say to them? That the French edition might be launched before the end of the year, and that she wanted to partner with French medias, and not “compete” with them. Here Huffington uses the same tactics as she did when Huffpo launched local editions in NYC or Chicago: partnering with local medias by giving them more visibility on the site.
The difference is that launching a “local” edition in France won’t be the same as launching local pages in the U.S., or even in the UK. In France, if you make an exception for the microcosm of experts who are very admiring about the HuffPo model (including me), still nobody has heard about The Huffington Post. Even the name is complicated for a French reader to pronounce.
Huffington will need to hire a strong newsroom, led by a charismatic editor-in-chief. But this won't be enough. The last American media that attempted to conquer France was Slate with its French edition Slate.fr. Slate decided to create a sister company with prestigious partners like Jean-Marie Colombani (former director of the French newspaper Le Monde) and the well-known writer Jacques Attali. Editor-in-chief Johann Hufnagel is also a charismatic boss. Former editor of the French daily newspaper Liberation, he has been editor-in-chief of the online edition of 20minutes, the third French news website. Nevertheless, Slate.fr has never reached its U.S. level of readership, and has stayed below 1 million users (Nielsen), even after 2 years (843,000 in July 2011). In comparison, Le Plus, a participative media I created in May 2011 for the French magazine le Nouvel Observateur, received 922,000 unique visitors in July, after just 2 months of existence and using just 4 journalists.
Huffington will need more than a great team and great ambitions.
Of course, “the 2012 presidential elections could provide the ideal traffic boost for a HuffPo France,” analyses Paul McNally in his blog. Sure. But every French media has been preparing itself for the event, and they all took The Huffington Post as a model. Finding a French blogger that hasn't already been solicited by a digital media is going to be a real challenge. By the way, in France, the best contributors are paid.
Of course, most of these medias haven’t yet understood what is HuffPo’s real key to success: compulsive curation of entertainment content, and a huge level of technology that allows them to adapt content to what people are looking for on Google and on social networks. And that asset is the one that could make the difference for The Huffington Post: they are Google and Facebook warriors. Whatever the popularity of their brand, they’re able to bring their content in at high level of “virality” and visibility in search engines.
Will that be enough to make it? I'd love for it to be. Because I love the way The Huffington Post changed the rules of media production and distribution. But Huffington will have to rethink a lot of things before attempting to conquer Europe. The media business is not like the movie business. Launching a new media is always a new adventure, not just a sequel. You can bring in a model, an experience, a vision…but you can’t just bring in templates.
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